Trash service being studied

Posted: Tuesday, August 26, 2008

By BLAKE AUED

Suburban and rural Clarke County residents soon could lose the right to choose who picks up their trash.

Some Athens-Clarke officials are pushing a plan to divide the county into three zones and pick one private garbage hauler for each zone, doing away with the current system that allows residents outside the former Athens city limits to hire any hauler they choose, or none at all.

The plan's backers say exclusive franchises will give the local government more control, improve service, encourage recycling and cut down on the number of trucks driving through neighborhoods.

"It's so competitive out there with all the haulers," Athens-Clarke Commissioner David Lynn said. "It's very difficult to manage."

If exclusive franchises are approved, private haulers fret that they'll be forced out of business, and critics don't think the change will do much to help Athens reach the commission's goal of improving its recycling rate from the current 27 percent to 50 percent.

"After talking to (private haulers) about our goals concerning the landfill and recycling, I am convinced that we can succeed in reaching our objectives much quicker and more efficiently by working with them," Commissioner Doug Lowry said.

Athens-Clarke County should focus efforts to increase recycling in the urban service district - inside the pre-unification city limits - where the county picks up trash from every single-family home, Lowry said. If options like mandatory recycling and accepting cardboard work there, they can be expanded into the formerly unincorporated county, he said.

The county requires haulers to offer recycling to customers, but does not force anyone to recycle.

With exclusive franchises, the county could force customers to put recyclables in a bin instead of the trash and make recycling easier by allowing residents to throw all their recyclables into one bin, Athens-Clarke Solid Waste Director Jim Corley told commissioners at an Aug. 12 work session.

County officials also would be able to control fees for trash pickup, Corley said. Private haulers charge too much to pick up small receptacles and too little for larger receptacles, giving customers little reason to recycle more and drop down to a smaller can size to save money, he said.

And the more trash is recycled in Athens, the longer the county's landfill will last.

"It's good policy, but if that's not enough for you, it's all about money," Lynn said.

Haulers, though, say they're willing to make those changes on their own.

"Bottom line, we want to work with Athens-Clarke County," said Matt DiPalma, who owns Winterville-based AAA Sanitation. "If they tell us what they want us to do, we'll do it. We don't want to lose our livelihood."

Haulers have an incentive to encourage recycling because it's free to drop off, but garbage costs $42 per ton to dump at the county landfill. Still, the savings don't cover the cost of extra trucks and crews to pick up recycling, said Matt Elder, owner of Oconee Waste Transport.

Recyclables dropped off by private haulers at the Athens-Clarke facility fell by 15 percent, from 6,260 tons in 2006 to 5,308 in 2007, according to the solid waste department. Those figures do not include paper, bottles and cans hauled to recycling facilities elsewhere. The recycling rate among private-hauler customers is in "the low teens," about half the rate in the urban district, Corley said.

Cutting haulers a break on their landfill bills if they hit recycling goals would give them even more incentive to push customers to recycle, Elder and DiPalma said.

At the work session earlier this month, commissioners said they sympathize with business owners who might go bust and suggested requiring the companies that win franchises to hire the other companies as subcontractors.

The commission is scheduled to vote in October whether to direct the solid waste department to prepare a detailed exclusive franchising plan. The plan looks likely to pass because most commissioners asked Corley to fast-track it earlier this year. If it is approved, the county will switch to exclusive franchising for single-family homes in 2010, followed by apartments and businesses.

Haulers would be allowed to bid on up to two of the proposed three zones. The lowest bidder would set prices for all four zones, including the urban district where the county collects trash. The county would bill all customers and require haulers to provide identical rollcarts.

"What you get in the urban service district, the rural service district, everything will be the same," Corley said.

Athens-Clarke County would join several other communities in Georgia, including Augusta-Richmond County and the city of Griffin, that already use an exclusive franchise system. Gwinnett County will switch to exclusive franchises next year, allowing it to double recycling to 23 percent, according to Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful.